Shelby Lynne

Sept. 11 • Southgate House

Singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne, whose rootsy and rockin’ but melodic and confessional 2000 album I Am Shelby Lynne became a classic of the Americana/AltCountry genre, is a bit
worried about her latest release, Tears,
Lies and Alibis. The
songs have a poetically observational precision that she takes care
not to bury with too much production or overly loud singing. The
uncluttered, analog-recorded result works smashingly — compositions
like “Rains Came,” “Why Didn’t You Call Me,” “Something
to Be Said” and “Loser Dreamer” have an introspective
dreaminess to them, even when they rock, that allows them to float
along on their quietly pleasurable melodies.

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“I don’t think everything has to
always necessarily be loud. Just because there’s space in a song,
you don’t have to fill it. I really like air, and I like a song to
breath. There’s not a lot of that today.”

The
album — recorded at her home studio and in Nashville — used a
fair amount of session players, including some Muscles
Shoals-experienced studio musicians who worked with her previously.
(She grew up in Alabama.) But her Saturday performance here will be
more radically stripped-down. It will just be her playing acoustic
guitar, with John Jackson moving between acoustic and electric
accompaniment. In addition to new songs, she’ll also play material
from her back catalog.

“This really allows the songs to be heard,” she says. “As much as I
love a band thing, I like this as well. It’s really intimate and
the album lends itself to being presented in an intimate manner.
These songs were written by me with just guitar, so in this setting I
take it back down to the original form.”

Tears, Lies and Alibis is Lynne’s first release on her own label, Everso. But she’s already announced the next one: Merry
Christmas comes out Oct. 12.

(Buy tickets, check out performance times and get venue details here.)